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Nietzsche on guilt: Dependency, debt, and imperfection
Author(s) -
Morrisson Iain
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
european journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.42
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1468-0378
pISSN - 0966-8373
DOI - 10.1111/ejop.12317
Subject(s) - existentialism , feeling , morality , philosophy , debt , conscience , reading (process) , dependency (uml) , state (computer science) , psychology , psychoanalysis , epistemology , economics , linguistics , finance , algorithm , systems engineering , computer science , engineering
In this paper, I offer a new way of reading Nietzsche's second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality . At the heart of my account is the claim that Nietzsche is primarily interested in a persistent or existential form of guilt in this essay and only concerned with locally reactive cases of guilt as a function of this deeper phenomenon. I argue that, for Nietzsche, this persistent form of guilt develops out of a deep feeling of indebtedness or owing that accompanies a fearful sense of dependency on the gods. When this sense of dependent indebtedness mixes with bad conscience, which arises through the shift from prehistoric tribes to state‐like communities, it becomes a moral problem; vast numbers of “slaves and serfs” (GM II.20) start to feel like they are not sufficiently honoring their dependent relationship with the gods. It is this feeling of persistent guilt that Nietzsche thinks metastasizes into Christian guilt.